I finished Richard Cavendish's The Black Arts this week. Not in the heroic readerly sense of having sat down and consumed it cleanly from first page to last, pencil in hand, scholar's lamp burning into the night. I have been reading it on and off for a few months. Picking it up, putting it down,...
Twenty-second-century historians tracing the ascent of American technocracy from quirky garage tinkerers grooving on the Whole Earth Catalog to sinister oligarchs enacting Philip K. Dick prophesies may locate its apogee in four lectures that Peter Thiel (net worth: $29 billion), chairman of the data-mining giant Palantir and a co-founder of PayPal,…
4,420 words 1. What Kind of Hero is Sigurd? The previous installment offered a summary and interpretation of Julius Evola’s writings on alchemy. This was to prepare us for what we will begin in this essay: an alchemical interpretation of the dragon slaying episode in the saga, as well as related events. Before we can […]
/blæk • ˈmɑːnə/ ◊ noun
Represents power, ruthless ambition, and sacrifice in pursuit of goals. Encompasses both natural expressions (death, decay) and unnatural ones (undeath). Drawn from Magic: the Gathering, it serves as a dispositional framework for understanding situational dynamics.
See: power, alchemy